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I understand your concern about Kostric because you researched his background.

But I’m still amazed at the amount of fear one guy with a sign and a gun can create, by just having a sign and a gun!
I suppose it’s simply a difference in where you live and what you’ve learned constitutes a threat.

The presence of people carrying guns (both concealed and in the open) was a common experience for me. You couldn’t distinguish a threat by the mere presence of a gun.
You had to look to their behaviour. Was it suspicious, outrageous, or in line with the situation?

To me, Kostric – holding his sign, carrying his gun, standing where he was told, not shouting epithets – was participating in the process.
Out in the open where he can be tagged and cataloged. In my experience, the people you have to worry about aren’t the people on the radar, it’s the people off.

So Kostric and his ilk are not a “threat”, but a mere concern to be watched.
The problem with watching for people that appear to be the next Timothy McVeigh is that the people who actually are the next McVeigh don’t look like it.

The threat isn’t the coyote standing in front of you, it’s the scorpion behind you.
If we spend too much time and energy giving power to the “nutters” like Kostric, we’ll miss the real threats when they come
crawling out from under the rock.

Perhaps you’re right and we don’t have anything to discuss, because Kostric’s actions don’t generate the same concern in me that they do in you.
And that’s the problem with any discussion, you have to find a common root to start from.

Our country is so diverse and yet so homogenized. It gives the appearance of a baseline unity based on shared experiences, but in reality that baseline is pretty thin.